His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most — not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his “convenience store diet,” he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub’s pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub’s “bad” cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his “good” cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

“That’s where the head scratching comes,” Haub said. “What does that mean? Does that mean I’m healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we’re missing something?”

Haub’s sample day
Espresso, Double: 6 calories; 0 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Centrum Advanced Formula From A To Zinc: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Little Debbie Star Crunch: 150 calories; 6 grams of fat

Hostess Twinkies Golden Sponge Cake: 150 calories; 5 grams of fat

Diet Mountain Dew: 0 calories; 0 grams of fat

Doritos Cool Ranch: 75 calories; 4 grams of fat

Kellogg’s Corn Pops: 220 calories; 0 grams of fat

whole milk: 150 calories; 8 grams of fat

baby carrots: 18 calories; 0 grams of fat

Duncan Hines Family Style Brownie Chewy Fudge: 270 calories; 14 grams of fat

Little Debbie Zebra Cake: 160 calories; 8 grams of fat

Muscle Milk Protein Shake: 240 calories; 9 grams of fat

Totals: 1,589 calories and 59 grams of fat Despite his temporary success, Haub does not recommend replicating his snack-centric diet.

“I’m not geared to say this is a good thing to do,” he said. “I’m stuck in the middle. I guess that’s the frustrating part. I can’t give a concrete answer. There’s not enough information to do that.”

Two-thirds of his total intake came from junk food. He also took a multivitamin pill and drank a protein shake daily. And he ate vegetables, typically a can of green beans or three to four celery stalks.

Families who live in food deserts have limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables, so they often rely on the kind of food Haub was eating.

“These foods are consumed by lots of people,” he said. “It may be an issue of portion size and moderation rather than total removal. I just think it’s unrealistic to expect people to totally drop these foods for vegetables and fruits. It may be healthy, but not realistic.”

Haub’s body fat dropped from 33.4 to 24.9 percent. This posed the question: What matters more for weight loss, the quantity or quality of calories?

His success is probably a result of caloric reduction, said Dawn Jackson Blatner, a dietitian based in Atlanta, Georgia.

“It’s a great reminder for weight loss that calories count,” she said. “Is that the bottom line to being healthy? That’s another story.”

Blatner, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, said she’s not surprised to hear Haub’s health markers improved even when he loaded up on processed snack cakes.

Being overweight is the central problem that leads to complications like high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol, she said.

How well are you managing your diabetes?

“When you lose weight, regardless of how you’re doing it — even if it’s with packaged foods, generally you will see these markers improve when weight loss has improved,” she said.

Before jumping on the Ding Dong bandwagon, Blatner warned of health concerns.

“There are things we can’t measure,” said Blatner, questioning how the lack of fruits and vegetables could affect long-term health. “How much does that affect the risk for cancer? We can’t measure how diet changes affect our health.”

I was eating healthier, but I wasn’t healthy. I was eating too much.

–Professor Mark Haub

“I’m eating to the point of need and pushing the plate or wrapper away,” he said.

He intended the trial to last a month as a teaching tool for his class. As he lost weight, Haub continued the diet until he reached a normal body mass index.

Before his Twinkie diet, he tried to eat a healthy diet that included whole grains, dietary fiber, berries and bananas, vegetables and occasional treats like pizza.

“There seems to be a disconnect between eating healthy and being healthy,” Haub said. “It may not be the same. I was eating healthier, but I wasn’t healthy. I was eating too much.”

He maintained the same level of moderate physical activity as before going on the diet. (Haub does not have any ties to the snack cake companies.)

To avoid setting a bad example for his kids, Haub ate vegetables in front of his family. Away from the dinner table, he usually unwrapped his meals.

Study: U.S. obesity rate will hit 42 percent

Haub monitored his body composition, blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose, and updated his progress on his Facebook page, Professor Haub’s diet experiment.

To curb calories, he avoided meat, whole grains and fruits. Once he started adding meat into the diet four weeks ago, his cholesterol level increased.

Haub plans to add about 300 calories to his daily intake now that he’s done with the diet. But he’s not ditching snack cakes altogether. Despite his weight loss, Haub feels ambivalence.

“I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it’s healthy. I’m not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it’s irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn’t say that.”

Dehydration is one of its tell-tale signs. In a camp in Cabaret, just east of Port-au-Prince, children lie on cots as life-sustaining fluids are pumped intravenously into their bodies.

The cholera outbreak in Haiti has now killed 583 people and another 9,123 people have been hospitalized, according to Gabriel Timothe, director general of Haiti’s Ministry of Health.

Medical personnel fear rising waters over the banks of Haiti’s Arbonite River, which they say is a source of contamination, have increased the risk of a wider rate of infections.

“We’re doing everything we can to mitigate [the] spread,” Dr. Jon K. Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization, said during a press conference on Tuesday.

Health officials had braced for problems after Tomas, fearing the hurricane that battered the Caribbean nation over the weekend could worsen the cholera outbreak.

On Monday, Dr. Toni Eyssallenne of Hospital Bernard Mevs confirmed the first case of cholera — in a 3-year-old boy — to originate and manifest entirely in Port-au-Prince.

Two more cases were confirmed Tuesday by Eyssallenne.

A 41-year-old woman who contracted the disease has not traveled in a year, the official said. A 33-year-old who lives in a tent city uses a communal water source. She, too, did not bring the infection into the city.

Previous cases had been centered in Haiti’s Artibonite and Central Plateau regions, including the city of St. Marc, north of the nation’s capital. Until Monday, health officials said that those being treated for cholera in Port-au-Prince all contracted the disease elsewhere.

The young Port-au-Prince boy lived in a tent city across the street from a place that sells macaroni, and he had not traveled in over a year, and he hadn’t had any contact with people from St. Marc or the Artibonite region, Eyssallenne said.

After suffering from nausea and diarrhea, the boy was treated and released from the hospital after his condition improved.

Hurricane Tomas’ trek past Haiti killed 20 people and injured another 36, a Communications Ministry official said Monday. Seven people were missing and 5,954 were homeless, the official said.

Health officials fear that the water dumped by the storm will worsen the outbreak. The concern is that overflow from latrines and septic tanks could contaminate the supply of fresh drinking water and contribute to the spread of the bacteria.

In the capital, the canals were not overflowing, said American Red Cross spokeswoman Andrea Koppel. But that was not the case in cities west of the capital, which bore the brunt of Hurricane Tomas, she said.

Still, even Port-au-Prince looks and smells like a dump — a caldron of water, garbage and human waste. “We get used to it,” said one resident.

Ten months after a magnitude-7 earthquake laid waste to much of the nation, people compete with animals scavenging through the ubiquitous dumps for scraps of food.

“The quick solution is management,” said Environment Minister Jean Marie Claude Germain. “Management meaning that you have a structure in place, but the structure was not conceived with the slums in mind.”

But most of the residents of Port-au-Prince live in slums.

“We’re working on it,” Germain said. “We will work with the private sector.”

The notion that Obama’s trip to India and other Asian countries will cost $200 million a day and will involve the deployment of 34 Navy ships sprang from a story published by the Press Trust of India on Tuesday. In that article, “a top official of the Maharashtra government privy to the arrangements for the high-profile visit” used the $200 million figure.

Cooper said that this was pretty thin material with which to attack Obama.

“We have no idea who this person is, no name was given,” he said. “It was an anonymous quote — the conduct Sarah Palin has recently been railing against. Some reporter in India wrote this article with this figure in it, no proof was given, no follow-up reporting done.”

“Lesbian rumors!” Oprah said in her trademark exaggerated voice.

But FLOTUS wasn’t the only one who boogie-woogied! The President got in on the action, too, celebrating Diwali. Then the First Couple headed off to New Delhi, with Michelle wearing a coat to match her frock and the President putting on his jacket while walking to Air Force One.

Check out a video and scroll down to see photos from their morning in Mumbai.

Minnesota was down in this game by as much as 14 points with less than five minutes left in regulation, but the Vikings benefitted from two final drives before the clock hit 0:00 in which they moves 137 total yards in eight plays, and Favre threw for 119 of his career-high 446 passing yards on those two drives without throwing an incomplete pass. The relative nail in the Cardinals’ coffin came when Favre threw this neat pass to tight end Visanthe Shiancoe(notes), right over super-stud safety Adrian Wilson(notes):

The Rev. Pat Robertson, on his CBN broadcast today, offered his own explanation of the earthquake in Haiti:
“Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” he said. “They were under the heel of the French … and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’

“True story. And the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal,’” Robertson said. “Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.”

His words, which refer to a piece of Haitian folklore about the country’s founders, come around the 6:00 mark in the report above, which also includes interviews with missionary groups active in the country.